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He rather did, and then continued doing it for years.
The Biden administration conducted a number of policy changes upon taking over from the trump administration, changes intended to increase the retention rate of migrants and well communicated to migration-related interolutors. These were changes to a status quo, done deliberately and systemically, with predictable and openly desired results by involved elements of the Biden administration. Biden made multiple domestic legal efforts to broaden the inflow potential, spending non-trivial political capital, to shift the status quo into a more publicly receptive position.
Unless one wants to redefine the term violence, enforcement of migration laws is not violence.
Compassion without consideration of the consequence and harms imposed onto others is not compassion.
Rather than compassion, the Democratic stance on migration is much more accurately characterized as a luxury belief, a performative display undertaken only so long as it does not become onus. This was most notably when the Texas migrant bussing began, and then Democrats began panicking at the fiscal burdens of accepting and housing a fraction of the migrants that they'd been in Texas and elsewhere for years.
Self-righteousness and punting the costs onto the outgroup may be a fundamental impulse, but it is not particularly moral.
Yes, it definitely is. Legitimate violence is still violence. I don’t mean that as an aspersion, and I’m not convinced @WandererintheWilderness did either. I was surprised to see you take it as such. Would you have objected if he said “elected not to use force” instead?
Yes, it is…sometimes. The obvious example would be charitable giving, or other acts where the cost is presumed to fall mostly on the giver. I would extend this to a number of general social courtesies. If I forgive someone for a mistake, it’s not because I amortized the social cost of not deterring another offense.
More to the point, I think pro-immigration advocates have considered the costs to others, and insist they’re small. Since the migrant busses were subsidized by Texas and Florida Republicans, the recipients could assign blame without reconsidering that belief.
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Isn't it still compassion, by definition, even if it is harmful? Not sure if the comparison is altogether valid, but violence used to prevent greater violence is still violence.
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Sure it is. I mean the term purely descriptively; it's how the business of government happens. The authorities acquire a monopoly on legitimate violence, and use that terrible but awe-some power to enforce laws and regulations for the public good. Enforcing migration laws entails preventing people from crossing the border if they're not allowed to do so, and expelling them if you catch them post hoc. This involves a threat, either explicit or implicit, of physical violence if they don't comply. That's just how it works.
I regard runaway pro-immigration sentiment as a case of people getting irrationally squeamish about one particular area of enforcement, even though they are not consistent anarchists.
You used the word pejoratively; it would not make sense as a moral argument justification if it were used in the purely descriptive sense that you now claim.
This line of argument has no limiting factor, and can apply as much to any interaction.
This internet interaction has an implicit possiblity of violence if certain boundaries are not obliged, since you could always turn to internet sleuths or hackers and seek to harm me if I annoyed you enough, or vice versa. Anyone weaker than you could infer an implicit threat of physical violence if they disagreed with you. Even people not weaker than you, but less interested in a topic, could take the firmness of your position as an implicit threat.
Fortunately, actual violence does not work that way, and neither do sound moral arguments resort to categorical pejorative redefinitions.
Yes it would. Or, to put it another way, I meant it in the objective sense of "if you don't comply, the government will send men with guns after you". I don't know what to tell you. There is of course a kind of implicit pejorative there, in that hurting people is wrong in a vacuum. But like anyone sensible, I recognize that violence can be justified in many cases, to prevent a greater evil. The state having the theoretical authority to use violence, and wielding it as a threat to prevent more chaos and suffering, is one such case. This is all pretty basic stuff.
The moral argument brought forward by pro-immigration extremists (when they are not outright anarchists who reject the premise that state violence is ever justified) is that the harm caused to immigrants by repression efforts is greater than any harm runaway immigration could cause. This is a dumb position and checked out from reality. But it has nothing to do with "pejorative redefinitions". It's just an extremely biased analysis with regards to the harms and benefits on both sides. A coherent anti-immigration argument still has to acknowledge that at some level you're saying "were an illegal to ignore all warnings and come anyway, there comes a point where we would physically shove, hit, or shoot that guy until he was no longer on our side of the border". Such an argument simply involves saying that the benefits of such a policy outweigh the minor moral cost of that violence.
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